When you have lived in one house for years and years, you don’t need much in the way of furniture. But this week I found myself in a furniture store I’d visited often in the past, attempting to find a couple small, sturdy pieces for a specific purpose. It was there that I felt the passage of time.
About a half hour before closing, I wandered Wood You Furniture, admiring beautiful bare wood and the occasional painted or stained display items, trying to locate that perfect, practical piece for the job and not get distracted by the canvas for the imagination before me. Even so, I found myself running my hand along the smooth services and opening drawers and cabinet doors of the pieces I found particularly enchanting. A sales woman kindly saved me from myself. She intercepted and warmly welcomed me, intent on helping me find exactly what I needed.
Our conversation and purposeful wanderings through the store ended up with me at the sales counter, giving my email address and phone number in addition to my credit card.
“S-a-r-a, has, the numeral five,” I told Julie, giving my email coordinates.
“Does that mean you have five children?” she asked me, smiling.
“Yes,” I admitted, “but my youngest is 19, so they’re not really children anymore.”
“I can’t believe you have five children! Certainly not five adult children!” she claimed. “You look wonderful.”
(I might have purchased anything she suggested at that point.)
“Well, the trick is to marry a widower with four children and only give birth to one.”
She countered that statement as she tried to find me in the computer. As she searched, I briefly shared our story — which included the fact that I had been widowed, my husband had been widowed, but before we’d found each other we’d found Wood You. We’d both not only shopped at the same store, but we’d also stained our furniture the same color. When we met and married to become a blended family, our furniture blended perfectly too.
“We were a match made in furniture heaven!” I finished, smiling.
By this time, Julie also had tried my former married name, as she hadn’t found my current married name in the computer records. My former name wasn’t there either. Funny, really, until I realized that we’d made most of our furniture purchases before we’d married and shortly after we had added the fifth child to our brood in 1996. Which was likely well before the store began using cloud computing for record keeping. (The world wide web has only been around since 1993, after all.)
Man, my furniture is old. And, apparently, we both look good. (Julie can vouch for me. I can vouch for the furniture.)
Posts for NaBloPoMo 2015:
- Why I love my hairstylist…
- To NaBloPoMo or not to NaBloPoMo? That is the question…
- No AC November…
- That dubious gift of an hour…
- I can’t wait to be discovered…
- Once an English teacher, always an English teacher…
- Of mice and men (or when you give a mouse a cookie)…
- When you replace people with possessions…
- Do what you know is right…
- When your eyes are bigger than your weekend…
- Attempting “The Glad Game”…
- When the Christian life is a bit too much like a political debate…
- Vertigo: When the world around you begins to spin…
- How our Mitsubishi van became blue…
- If she only knew…
- When everything feels like straw…
- Construction criticism (or where have all the detours gone?)…
- Don’t skimp on the showers…
- My surprise “happily ever after” …
- In fact, we are not entitled…
- The end of the twin era…
- More time is not always the answer…
- When furniture shows your age…
All Things Work Together 
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